


Books Written by Rabbits

by Storycat9



Category: Lucifer (TV), The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Coping, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Identity, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storycat9/pseuds/Storycat9
Summary: Lucifer was not the first immortal to lose his face, or lose his love, or run away. But he hadn’t quite expected sympathy from this one.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Prince Lír/Unicorn | Lady Amalthea
Comments: 32
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

He spotted her on the third day of a five-day gig in Edinburgh, in a bar tucked into an alley off Fleshmarket Close. 

No sleek club, this; it was down the way from the student hostel, only uplifted from a pub by its extensive and excellent whisky selection and the well-tuned upright piano in one corner.

That was fine with Lucifer; he wanted only to drink and to play and to drink more until the agony in every cell eased just a little. 

_There are a hundred places where I fear to go—so with her memory they brim ..._

He’d never met Edna St. Vincent Millay, never felt the poem before he watched the world close down around him: Los Angeles, of course; New York and London; Paris and Prague; Cape Town and Kyoto; even Orlando, Florida, for Dad’s sake. All the cities he’d been so proud to show off over the years, stamped with memories of their laughter; of candlelit dinners in romantic bistros and lazy afternoons of sex that seemed golden and unending; of his Detective and still-young Trixie, both in Mouse ears, both exhausted and grinning. A lifetime of places, and Lucifer supposed now he should be grateful his Detective was more of a homebody than a jet-setter, or the last 34 years would have been even more tortuous than they already had been. As it was, Lucifer could keep moving, and keep a little bit ahead of it.

This week, he was filling the evening music for the simple exchange of a bottomless scotch glass. Considering the expensive labels he selected, this probably wasn’t the best deal for the owner, in spite of how people seemed to flow like water into the bar at the sound of the piano. But the young man would have given a soul the Devil didn’t want just to stand needlessly wiping down the bar and watch him play.

Somewhere toward the middle of his second set, Lucifer felt a … warmth … against the side of his face. Like sunlight on a winter morning, not enough to truly take away the chill, but enough to let you know it’s there. He turned a little, caught a faint shimmer like dusty starlight in the corner of the bar, behind a crowd of other bar patrons.

It stayed, that warmth, and felt neither welcoming nor aggressive, as watchful as his own stars. As he ended his set he felt it move, and just barely caught a sliver of white hair on a navy wool coat as the bar’s entry door swung shut.

* * *

That night, Lucifer still drank. But he entered the Dream Lord’s realm for the first time in a long time. He dreamt of walking through a path in a lilac wood, holding Chloe’s hand. She was young again--not as young as when they first met, but as young as when they were years into being happy together--and she leaned her head against his shoulder as they walked. 

“The leaves will never fall here, or the snow,” he heard himself say. “It is always spring here.”

She shook her head gently against his shoulder. “Even this changed.” She looked up at him with eyes like the Aegean. “But we’re here now, aren’t we?”

He shuddered awake, panting.

* * *

Lucifer walked the twisting cobblestones of old Edinburgh the next day, thinking of what he’d seen and sensed. It wasn’t Celestial, wasn’t Fae, which might have made more sense here, but it was something. And for the first time in the four decades since the doctor’s office he felt something other than desolation or desperation: curiosity.

He sat down to his first set that night with a list of old, old songs, lilting or haunting or playful. Songs meant to call and tempt.

Lucifer was rewarded with a clearer look this time, as she came in near the end of his first set. A slim woman perched on a stool against the bar in the corner opposite the piano, tucked away but with a full view of the room. She wore a finely carded navy wool coat with a long grey scarf, none of which she’d even loosened. Her long, pale fingers clasped each other in her lap, and her face could have been 20 or 40 or something entirely ageless. Her hair, plaited into a herringbone, spilled over one shoulder, the color of moonlight on snow. He could not see her eyes, but didn’t need to. He could see her true Shape for a moment, and wondered only why she would ever be in such a form, and such a place as this. He nodded to her, formally, but made no move to approach.

She accepted his notice, this time. At the end of the second set, when he might normally begin to drink in earnest, he went to the bar a careful distance away from her stool and looked at her over his drink. He wanted to speak low, as to a Queen or a wild animal, which is why his voice came out laughing and ironic.

“Dearie me, you are a long way from home. More scrub than forest around here.”

A corner of her mouth quirked up, a strange, wry expression for such a creature. “I’ve no more home than you,” she said with an accent long dead. “My Woods were cut down long ago.”

The _wrongness_ of that made his eyes flash fire. “Who did this to you? Your people were never meant to leave their homes.”

She met his eyes steadily, and he could see in endless blue the lilac forest, the black machines, the chaos and confusion. She blinked, and it was gone.

“Time and Men, who else, Morningstar?” she said, wrapping the fingers of both hands around a glass of wine nearly as pale as she was. "They took down most of my people with them. There were never so very many of us, and most of us were never much good at rescuing ourselves.”

Lucifer had thought his heart couldn’t hurt any more, but this was one more touch of bitterness. “You saved yourselves during the Flood,” he said. “None of the others defied Dad about the whole ark thing and lived to tell the tale.”

She tossed her head in a shrug more at home on a different Shape, and smiled again. “Your Father’s humans seemed inordinately surprised that we could swim.”

He tipped his glass to her; anyone who could shrug off one of his Father’s temper tantrums earned his respect. He looked back down at his drink, and the two of them sat in tentatively companionable silence until he finished it and called for another. The young man behind the bar tilted his head at Lucifer as he poured the whisky, offering his throat. Lucifer gestured minutely, “and for the lady.”

The bartender startled, as though he’d had no idea she was there, and then a puzzled, dreaming look filled up his eyes. She only shook her head and waited until he wandered off again. It was like watching the opposite of his own mojo, a “don’t look” so strong it was nearly invisibility. 

That made a certain amount of sense. No one could look like her and just walk into a bar full of drunk twenty-somethings without getting mobbed. Her very stillness was striking. Lucifer could see no more movement than the flash of a pulse at her throat. 

She watched the bartender leave, then rubbed two fingers to her forehead as though she had a headache. “I sometimes miss being seen. There are so few now who can see me as I truly am, and not run mad for fear.”

“No one would fear you,” he said with surprise. “Your people were always the fairest and most beautiful of all Dad’s creatures.”

“You of all know better. Son of the Morning: most beautiful of the Heavens, once and still.” She said it without mockery. “Humans cannot see us anymore, unless we show them deliberately, and force them to believe it.” 

She frowned, tossed her head again, and Lucifer saw a reflection of his own irritable Pride on her face. “And why should I? I was not made to go begging for scraps of attention from mortal beings. I am myself, whether they see me or not, and I would rather be myself and go unseen than be what they would see of me. Still, it is a lonely thing, sometimes.”

Lucifer tipped back the rest of his drink, and set the glass down with a small click on the counter. He had been missing Chloe for so much longer than he’d known her, and it still felt like never getting enough air.

“So,” he asked hoarsely, “what do you desire from me?”

“Who says I want anything from you?”

He huffed a laugh. “Because no one alive seeks me out just to visit, and it would be the last, most desperate unicorn in the world who sought out Lucifer Morningstar for any reason at all.”

She hummed a moment, then stood, more graceful than one of his siblings. 

“Would you come for a walk with me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem quoted near the beginning is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and is quite lovely:  
> Time does not bring relief; you all have lied  
> Who told me time would ease me of my pain!  
> I miss him in the weeping of the rain;  
> I want him at the shrinking of the tide;  
> The old snows melt from every mountain-side,  
> And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;  
> But last year’s bitter loving must remain  
> Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.  
> There are a hundred places where I fear  
> To go,—so with his memory they brim.  
> And entering with relief some quiet place  
> Where never fell his foot or shone his face  
> I say, “There is no memory of him here!”  
> And so stand stricken, so remembering him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Devil and a Unicorn walk out of a bar.

Her hooves clicked on the cobblestones as they strolled.

Lucifer could _hear_ them, under the faint mundane cover of her human flats. It was unnerving to have her pace at his side and see her form flicker into almost heart-stopping brilliance for a moment before solidifying again into a tall, lovely human woman. The glimpse of her true form seemed halfway between flirtatious and formal, but he caught the little half-smile on her lips and knew she was teasing him in her fey way.

“How did you end up as you are?” he asked as they started down Market Street towards the gardens. He wasn’t sure whether she lived near them--he wouldn’t be surprised if so--or if she simply favored being as close to wooded areas as possible.

The unicorn then unwound a quest to save her whole kidnapped unicorn kind, trapped by an evil, desolate king and his demonic flaming Bull. A magician bumbling along under his own curse had disguised her as a mortal girl to help her infiltrate the castle to find a way to free her people.

Lucifer grinned at the unicorn. “Who says there aren’t fairy tales? A little girl I used to know would have loved that story.”

The unicorn shook her head. “It was hardly heroic. The king trapped us, my Magician, my Molly and I. Why bother to confront us when he could see what I was as easily as you can? He knew he only had to keep us there and wait for me to lose my mind.”

Lucifer started at that, but she went on. “I nearly did, Morningstar. I was trapped inside a _mortal_ body. I scraped my hands against the castle wall and _bled_ , can you understand? Everything was new and fragile. I had human emotions that made me dizzy and sick; I made no sense to myself. My companions had to keep reminding me who I was and what we were looking for. Molly and Schmendrick, the ones who had accompanied me, called me Amalthea--”

“--after the _goat_?!” he choked out, but she only smiled.

“--and that mortal name seemed to grow the longer I was stuck there. The king’s son, Lír …. ”

The unicorn stopped at the path down into the gardens and gripped the iron fence overlooking a hillside of moonlit daffodils. Lucifer turned from her and flicked out his silver lighter for a cigarette. He could see in her face what was coming and couldn’t watch it. 

_Chloe, Chloe_ pulsed in his brain like a migraine.

“I think the Prince was more fairy tale than I was. He was funny and silly and far too idealistic. He loved me even without being able to see me, and … and he made me want to be the person he saw. To be Amalthea, and not just a unicorn.”

Lucifer felt cold through every part of himself. He tried for nonchalance. “You stayed human for the prince.”

But the unicorn shook her head. “Nooo, not hardly. The Bull finally came for me, and my Magician managed to give me back my form to escape. The Prince saw me then--saw who I really was--but he still tried to stand between the Bull and myself.” 

She laughed a little, fondly, as though she still couldn’t quite believe it. 

“Lír was trampled, and I truly did lose my mind," she continued in her quiet, liquid voice. "Losing the Prince, losing my mortality all at once. I don’t remember driving the Bull into the sea. I remember my people surging up around me like froth, but none of them stopped to thank me or grieve with me. Maybe I’d changed so much they couldn’t recognize me anymore.

“In the end I was alone with my humans on the sand, and couldn’t even bring myself to care about my people. I healed the Prince, and I left before he could wake up enough to see me. I ran for such a long time after that.”

She fell silent, and the two of them started down the hill into the wild gardens. The moon was bright enough that Lucifer could see outlines of the Castle Edinburgh on the hill before them. At length, she asked, “Did you run, too?”

The flare of anger at her invasion of privacy died almost as it started; he had no energy to sustain it, and her quiet voice reminded him somehow of Linda’s. “Yes and no, and then yes again,” he said. “She loved me before she saw me, too, and I ran. And then she saw me, and _she_ ran. And then we both came back, and we stayed together until she died. And … I guess I lost my mind a little, like you.”

“How long?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long did you have, after you both came back?”

“Just shy of 48 years.”

“And you both knew each other, all that time? She loved who you really were?”

“She did. We did.” It bled out of him. 

The most beautiful creature on earth looked at him for a long moment, and then said, “I saw Lír again once after the beach.

"He was old and covered in his own gore, but he was still himself. I killed the griffin that killed him, but I could not keep him with me. As best I can hope, we had two moments in which he truly knew who I was and we loved each other: just before he stepped in front of the Bull, and just after I killed the Griffin. Those two were enough to burn Amalthea into me. I am still immortal, but since then some little piece of me still lives and dies, over and over again.”

Lucifer had to stop, head down, and breathe through the tightness in his throat. He’d managed a thousand years in Hell on the strength of a handful of kisses, yes, but all his years together with Chloe had made him endlessly, achingly greedy. “Not enough,” he rasped. 

Defiance flared in her eyes, and Lucifer suddenly could see how a demon bull and a griffin had given way before her. 

“Of course there is never enough,” she hissed in a voice like a tide over sand, “but you and I have had so much more than our own people can comprehend, much less the humans. Even our _regrets_ are more than they have had, and I would not give them up. If you don't know that, you don't understand as much as I'd thought you did.”

The unicorn turned from him and strode down the winding path, anger in the lines of her body. Just who the fuck did she think she was? _She_ came to _him_ , and Lucifer still didn’t know why, and she had the nerve to insult him to his face? Part of him wanted to rage, to turn and leave the path and city and country in one swoop, to hell with this upright talking _animal_ daring to think she knew anything about him at all. 

But this _was_ the most anyone had known of him--hell, maybe his longest personal conversation--in more than three decades. He lengthened his stride a bit, grabbed her arm. “Why would I bother to regret, darling?” He forced a grin. “I drink. Much more fun.”

The unicorn froze at his touch, that inhuman stillness only someone like himself was capable of. He let go of her, but slowly, as though she was Maze with a blade and a grudge. 

She took a long breath. From one of the deep pockets of her navy coat she withdrew a silver flask, took her own gulp and offered it to him. “Sometimes, Morningstar, I agree.”

A real, surprised chuckle replaced Lucifer’s contrived smile and he accepted the drink.

“Lucifer,” he corrected, taking a long draught and handing back her flask. His amusement deepened as he realized the scotch she kept squirreled away in her pocket flask rivalled his own. “You’re offering 28-year-old Laphroaig, you can call me by name, I think. What do I call you?”

She faltered a moment, then shrugged as she started to walk again. “Unicorns don’t have names in the way humans--or celestials--do. My mortal name’s long since lost at this point. My Magician was the last to call me by that name, and he’s been gone since 1838.”

“Have I heard of him?” Lucifer asked, easing away from her name as he’d eased away from her arm. 

Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps? Schmendrick. He was the worst magician in the world for a very long time, and then one of the best, and I’m not sure which title brought him more fame. Neither seemed to make him dress better, anyway, so he may not have moved in your circles.”

“I move in a lot of circles,” Lucifer said with a grin, “but no, never heard of him.” A memory floated up of a scruffy, tow-headed hedgewitch with a filthy trench coat and an even filthier mouth. He idly wondered if John was still alive. Miracle on par with Chloe’s birth, if he was. The bastard courted trouble better than Mazikeen. “Did you ever happen to meet a magician by the name of Constantine? Blond, yea-high, bit of an arse?”

The unicorn looked bemused, then her eyes widened and her mouth dropped a little in recognition. “Oh! I believe so. John, yes? He came looking for a purification spell from my Magician once. Schmendrick had already died, but …” she gestured to herself vaguely, lifting an eyebrow, “... purification is not exactly difficult for me. He was perhaps overly impressed.”

“Duly impressed, I’m sure,” Lucifer said, pressing his tongue to the side of his cheek as he imagined the gobsmacked look on Johnny boy’s face once he realized who he was looking at. 

“Mmm.” Her eyes glinted in amusement. “He fainted.”

Lucifer laughed out loud. And so they went.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A duet, a deal, and a dance.

He’d been exhausted and hung over for decades, but it wasn’t as though either of them needed sleep. They walked through the dawn and into the next day. They left the garden and kept going down Leith Walk through the city to the Firth of Fourth.

On the way, the unicorn shivered, and Lucifer made the mistake of mentioning how much warmer and sunnier it was in Los Angeles. That led to Lux, to the police and Miss Lopez and Daniel, and he bit down on his tongue hard enough to taste blood to keep the Detective and Beatrice behind his lips. 

She did not question why the Devil might want to solve crimes or help people or have human friends. A unicorn is pure wild magic, not divinity; a unicorn does not read religious paraphernalia regardless of how many Christ metaphors use her likeness; she saw Lucifer as immortal and singular as herself, and as entitled to keep his own counsel. 

After the third or fourth time he choked back the names of those dearest to him, the unicorn tilted her head toward a café and invited him to breakfast. 

Amalthea was comfortingly inhuman. Her hair gleamed in its plait like a handful of his feathers, and she kept bundled up even after they were seated, hiding from their waiter in the shadow of his devilish charisma. The unicorn did not touch him, as one of his friends or even a human in his club would have, and Lucifer could tell she wouldn’t welcome physical contact. But by her nature, the unicorn’s presence was a little like getting a contact high off some very, very good weed. Lucifer felt sunlight and the smell of grass. They talked casually about places and times they’d visited.

Lucifer told her about coming up from Hell to the beach in Kokura City two days after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, just to find out why the bloody fuck so many Souls had turned up all at once--only to barely miss the Fat Man landing on his head. She told him about having tea with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and helping him unlock a mug he’d chained to the radiator, after he misplaced his key. 

He told her about duets with Mozart and Elvis Presley and Nina Simone. She told him about stumbling upon Miles Davis playing alone in an empty bar a few days after he’d been beaten by a cop outside Birdland. He’d accepted a drink from her, but had been too dazed and angry to let her heal the bruises on his chest and cuts across his scalp. 

“I think you might have been more of a comfort to him,” she told Lucifer. “He needed someone to tell him the man who beat him would be punished for it someday.”

She spoke of her own humans--save one--with bemused affection. There had been four old soldiers who turned young again in her presence, and a little girl she’d visited from time to time after saving her dog. There had been her Molly--Lucifer couldn’t quite tell whether that was a name or a title from the way she said it--who seemed to have been a little like Linda for her. She’d had a terrible temper, Amalthea said, and the Magician had loved her.

“My Magician found my lilac Woods again after he lost our Molly,” she said. “He had lived so long, but he was aging, and he was mortal in his grief. Had I not been there, he would have followed her immediately. I think he had had a dream of the end of the Woods, and knew that one day I would need this form again. I let him teach me how to give myself the shape at least, if not mortality itself again.”

She fell silent, and when the silence stretched, Lucifer looked up to see that she had been watching him rub his right thumb back and forth fitfully over his left palm. If his Father had ever been kind, Lucifer would have a scar there, the remnants of the gash from a pocket knife that proved him vulnerable to the Detective, once upon a time. He had a body full of reminders of his Fall, but none of the scars he wanted, he’d been able to keep. Chloe or Linda, Trixie or Ella--hell, even Dan or Eve would have prodded him about it by now. The unicorn was immortal. She asked no questions. She almost certainly knew the scar was there without seeing it.

A century ago, the Devil might have propositioned her, if only to be able to say he had. He’d managed as much with creatures far less human. But the unicorn’s company made it almost bearable to think of his Detective. He thought he might find the strength to talk about Chloe, if he stayed in her company a while longer. And the unicorn still hadn’t told him what she wanted.

“Here's where I go in,” Lucifer said as their walk brought them near his hotel. “Tonight’s my last night at the bar. Will you be there?”

“Tonight’s my last night in Edinburgh,” she said. “And yes.”

* * *

He fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit his hotel pillow.

He dreamt himself sitting with Chloe on a sun-drenched beach, which was somehow both _their_ beach and not. The sand felt the same, but high cliffs rose behind them and in front of them waves broke and frothed endlessly over rocks that had no place in Southern California.

Her shoulder pressed against his and he threw a comfortable arm around her. “Should I pull out the wine?” he asked, reaching for the picnic basket beside him. 

Chloe smiled, kissed him but shook her head. “The tide is turning; we’ll have to leave soon. Just sit and hold me. Let’s watch them come.”

Lucifer woke with the smell of her hair in his nostrils, the taste of her skin in his mouth, and sea spray on his cheeks.

* * *

When Lucifer turned onto Fleshmarket Close early that evening, the music was already drifting out of the bar up the road. It was nothing modern or jazzy; it was a far cry even from the folk songs he’d teased the night before. And he knew before he reached the door that it didn’t matter, couldn’t matter: Not a soul in the place was so damned that they could hear this music and ask for anything else.

The unicorn had beaten him there.

She perched on a high stool next to the upright piano, a small, honest-to-Dad lute in her hands, and her voice was clear and haunting enough to rival his sister Gabriel on her best day. The unicorn passed lyrics from language to language like a child tossing a ball from hand to hand, and while he could follow every word, the packed audience almost certainly could not; the lilting, almost-French or -English phrases hadn’t been captured since tapestries and illuminated manuscripts were in style.

Fins cuers doulz, on me deffent | Sweet noble heart, I am forbidden  
---|---  
De par vous que plus ne voie | to ever see you again  
Vostre doulz viaire gent | your fair sweet face  
Qui d’amer m’a mis en voie; | which put me on the path of love;  
Mais vraiement, je ne sçay | but truly I do not know  
Comment je m’en attendray | how I can expect  
Que briefment morir ne doie: | not to have to die soon.  
Et s’il m’en faut abstenir | And if I must abstain  
Pour faire vostre plaisir, | to give you pleasure,  
Ou envers vous faus seroie, | or else be untrue to you,  
S’aim trop mieus ma loyauté | then I would rather keep my loyalty  
Garder et par vostre gré | and according to your will  
Morir, se vos cuers l’ottroie, | die, if your heart wishes it,  
Qu’encontre vostre voloir, | than against your will  
Par vostre biauté veioir, | to receive complete joy  
Recüsse toute joie | by viewing your beauty.  
Fins cuers doulz,  | Sweet noble heart,   
Amouretes m’ont navré; | I am wounded by love  
Por ce sui mas et pensis, | so that I am sad and pensive,  
Si n’a en moy jeu ne ris, | and have no joy or mirth,  
Car a vous, conpaignete, | for to you, my sweet companion,  
Ay mon cuer einsi doné. | I have thus given my heart.  
  
  
She wore a long, greyish-purple dress, slightly off her pale shoulders. Her hair was uncovered and unbound; it fell like a cape, opalescent and alive as his own feathers. Her eyes glowed blue and she sang without tempering to protect the sanity of the hapless desk-workers who’d stumbled in for happy hour. The crowd swayed a little, all of them. Tears ran down their cheeks, and they held onto each other like they were all on molly rolling wide and deep as the ocean. Even his bartender friend made a hushed, wondering noise in the back of his throat and all of Lucifer’s infernal charm couldn’t have torn his attention away from her face.

Lucifer had told the unicorn she had nothing to hide, and now she sang as though waiting for him to get the joke. And he did, he _did_ … for she still wasn’t in her true Shape. This was _Amalthea_ , this was as human as she had been for the humans she had loved, before she’d learned to fold everything away for almost always, and she was still nothing humans could really comprehend.

 _Ok, yes, ok, I get it._

Earth-dark eyes met midnight-sky eyes, and he nodded to her. She smiled and waved him forward, and he sat down at the piano beside her. His dark baritone joined her soprano, and they passed the songs back and forth between them, whatever they remembered that had been long forgotten; whatever came to mind.

Lucifer thought of one he hoped Chloe might hear, and he saw from the way Amalthea’s eyes brightened that someone, someone had sung it to her, once upon a time. She wove a pretty countermelody in Old French around his own:

F _oy porter, honneur garder_ | _I want to stay faithful, guard your honor_  
---|---  
_Et pais querir, oubeir_ | _Seek peace, obey_  
  
_Doubter, servir, et honnourer_

_Vous vueil jusques au morir_

| _Fear, serve and honor you until death_  
_Car tant vous aim, sans mentir_ | _For I love you so much, truly,_  
_Qu’on poroit avant tarir_ | _That one could sooner dry up_  
_La haute mer_ | _the deep sea_  
_Et ses ondes retenir_ | _and hold back its waves_  
_Que me peusse alentir de vous amer._ | _than I could constrain myself from loving you._  
_Sans fausser; car mi penser,_ | _without falsehood; for my thoughts_  
_Mi souvenir, mi plaisir_ | _my memories, my pleasures_  
_Et mi desir sont sans finer_ | _and my desires are perpetually_  
  
_En vous que ne puis guerpir n’entroublier_

| _of you, whom I cannot leave or even briefly forget._  
_Il ne’est joie ne joir n’autre bien qu’on puist sentir_ | _There is no joy or pleasure or any other good that one could feel_  
_N’imaginer qui ne me samble languir,_ | _or imagine which does not seem to me worthless whenever your sweetness wants to sweeten my bitterness._  
_Quant vo douceur adoucir vuet mon amer: Dont loer et aourer_ | _Therefore I want to praise and adore and fear you,_  
_Et vous cremier, tout souffrir, tout conjoir, tout endurer_ | _suffer everything, experience everything, endure everything_  
_Vueil plus que je ne desir Guerredonner._  
_Foy porter . . ._ | _More than I desire any reward, I want to stay faithful . . ._  
_Vous estes le vray saphir qui puet tous mes maus garir et terminer._ | _You are the true sapphire that can heal and end all my sufferings,_  
_Esmeraude a resjoir, rubis pour cuers esclarcir et conforter._ | _the emerald which brings rejoicing, the ruby to brighten and comfort the heart._  
_Vo parler, vo regarder, vo maintenir, font fuir et enhair et despiter_ | _Your speech, your looks, your bearing, make one flee and hate and detest_  
_Tout vice et tout bien cherir et desirer_ | _all vice and cherish and desire all that is good._  
_Foy porter . . ._ | _I want to stay faithful. . ._  
  
Diva though he was, Lucifer ignored the room until the unicorn laid her hand in the air above his shoulder and looked behind him.

“I think perhaps they have had enough to still be safe. Have you met the terms of your agreement here?”

Lucifer turned to follow her gaze. They were wrecked, all of them, and more who’d come in since he’d entered, and more who spilled out into the street, likely as far as the music drifted. He’d seen lovers at the end of a three-day orgy who hadn’t looked so spent. The bar was packed so tightly he wasn’t sure how they would leave, but he was pretty sure a glare from the Devil could clear a path.

He threw her a wide, dark grin. “Well, darling, they got a duet, didn’t they? Two for the price of one, as it were. And considering we’ve rolled half of downtown Edinburgh in less than two hours, I’d say they’ve no cause for complaint. Might be a new personal best, actually.”

Lucifer stood, smoothed his jacket and straightened his cuffs, held his palm up to help the unicorn off the stool as though he’d stepped back into the time of their singing. Amalthea laid her fingers on his own in a gesture older than the city itself, and he led her out, with the crowd silent and melting away before them.

* * *

Outside and away, with cobblestones still underfoot but the sound of traffic in the distance, Lucifer turned to face Amalthea. He laid the ghost of a kiss over her hand, courtly and grave rather than flirtatious.

“I ask a third time: What do you desire of me, Lady?”

Her eyes filled. Her whole form trembled, hair to heel.

“I want to see you, Lucifer Morningstar, and be seen. I want to leave here knowing there is another like me in the world.”

He understood, and it was a gift as much as a request. But he had a reputation to maintain, didn’t he?

“And in return?” he purred. He doubted he'd get anything lascivious from a unicorn, but he was genuinely interested in what she might offer.

“Tell me the name of the one you won't speak of, and I will remember her,” the unicorn said. “I will keep them all, the ones you love, when no one else on earth remembers their names, when all traces of them have been worn away. I am as immortal as you are, and I will honor them.”

Oh.

Oh, _Dad_.

Lucifer thought of all the songs that people had forgotten in just a few short centuries. He thought of Charlie, already gone, and Beatrice’s son long grown, and of how soon even Los Angeles may be just another ruin sleeping beneath another city. He felt everything he'd thought hidden ripped out of his chest and bleeding onto the cold ground between them.

He breathed out, “ _Done_.”

* * *

In the waning moonlight outside Craigmillar Castle, two stars race each other through the fields and heath. 

One runs at the speed of life itself, on legs that seem too thin and fine to bear her weight, plunging headlong down twisting wooded trails lit only by the seashell brilliance of a spiral horn ridiculously long for her head. Poets or children might say she looks like flowing flame, or living music, but only a celestial is keen enough to see the real muscles bunch and press with each stride. A bright, pealing whinny of joy echoes from her as she runs. She's a creature of wild magic whose lightning gets cloaked in mist--or worse, fake rainbows and fluff--but whose real light is too searing for most.

And weaving through the trees, now above, now beside her, swooping just low enough to brush a wing against her flank, whooping as she leaps to spark light from her horn to his hand, is another immortal she can know in the world. 

At times tonight his skin was red, his wings leathern, the shape and texture of grief as he whispered ... _Chloe, Beatrice, Charlotte, Uriel_ … as he taught her the stories to remember. 

Yet now someone else shares the weight of these memories. Some grace lifts moon-white feathers and gives him breath to call out to a friend. 

Given and reflected back, Lucifer finds he still has some light left to bring.

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, both of the songs Lucifer and Amalthea sing are rather beautiful courtly love songs from troubadours in the Medieval period. After I started reading a few, they made an awful lot of sense in Lucifer's view of Chloe through most of the seasons, and certainly they fit right in with what the unicorn would remember of Lir wooing Amalthea. I tend to think of Lucifer singing in Old English and Amalthea picking up Old French.

**Author's Note:**

> Sure, it's the crossover nobody asked for, but I don't care. I loved The Last Unicorn (and its sequel Two Hearts) as a kid, but it always seemed to me that Lir was kinda hand-wavy about who Amalthea really was with his "I love whom I love," and that was Never Going to End Well. I still have hope for Deckerstar, of course, but hey, immortality is an angsty trope for a reason. 
> 
> “As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.”  
> ― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn


End file.
